Ahh Yes. Let Me Introduce You To The Ancient Australian Hymn, Song About Birds.

Ahh yes. Let me introduce you to the ancient Australian hymn, Song About Birds.

nothing has fucked me up more than knowing the australian white ibis has a near-identical sister species called the african sacred ibis. the african sacred ibis is associated with thoth, ancient god of wisdom and reason. the australian white ibis is most commonly referred to as a “bin chicken”.

Awakening

Voices.

That was the first thing I was aware of, breaking through the tranquil oblivion like a stone cast into a still pool. Someone was speaking, though I couldn't make out what was being said. It sounded distant, as if a league of water separated us. Grasping weakly at consciousness, I tried to call out, to stir...

And the second thing I became aware of was the pain.

I became reacquainted with my body as a dull ache spread through it, starting with my head and making its way down my core and out to my limbs. The ache gradually intensified as the moments dripped by, as did the voices. Though still muffled, as my sentience returned to me I realized I could neither recognize nor understand them. Still unable to move, I found the only muscles that would respond to me were my eyelids. I opened them, eager to test another sense.

I saw nothing at all, just the same oppressive, featureless darkness. The only thing that changed was some sort of cold fluid now pressing against my exposed corneas. I panicked for a fraction of a second, suddenly afraid of drowning, before realizing I was still breathing. As tactile sense surfaced above the omnipresent ache, I became aware of a breathing mask over my face, as well as IV feeds in my arms and electrodes all over my body. What was all that about…?

It occurred to me then that I did not know where I was. The first coherent internal dialog I produced was a simple ‘oh no,’ as my heart began to pick up its pace. The last thing I remembered… I was on a vast ship, bound for a distant star, never to return. Had we arrived at long last?

A loud, beeping alarm startled me. Despite the pain, confusion, and weakness suffusing every fiber of my being, at last I began to stir. So too did my surroundings: there was a quiet rumble and an accompanying hiss as the frigid fluid started to drain. The voices changed cadence, evidently surprised, and got louder- no, closer.

Though the light was dim, it nearly blinded me as the cover of my stasis chamber was lifted open. I squinted at the shapes attached to the voices; they were blurry and indistinct. One of them leaned closer, and I was able to resolve some features. Long, white hair, elegant feminine facial structure, piercing golden eyes. A pair of shapes loomed just behind them, large and white and triangular. Feathered. Were those… wings?

The person said something- a question I couldn't understand. They gently removed the breathing mask. I coughed at the first taste of stale, cold air, and the pain flared in my chest, threatening to shake my grasp on the waking world. The stranger touched my face with delicate grace, concern apparent on their own. I was struck by a thought.

“Are… you… an angel?” I managed to gasp, weakly.

My savior frowned, and said something else that was lost on me. The other voice, from somewhere outside my field of vision, gave a reply that seemed to disappoint them. I understood only one word, a name I vaguely recalled from somewhere in ancient mythology: “Mnemosyne.” The winged being nodded, and placed the mask back over my mouth and nose. Before I could protest, they placed some sort of device against my forehead, and I sunk back into dreamless nothing.

When I awoke again, a different voice greeted me -one I could understand, this time.

“Hello, friend,” it said. It was soft, pleasant… welcoming.

I opened my eyes, but the light was too bright, and I shut them quickly.

“Please, take your time adjusting to the burden of consciousness; you have been in stasis for a very long time.”

Stasis. Yes. Now that I was awake, we must have reached our destination. I noted, with relief, that the all-consuming ache was no longer all-consuming. The air was warm, and fresh. I opened my eyes very slightly, letting them acclimate to the revival room.

“That’s it, ease into the heat and light,” the voice encouraged me. “There we go.”

After several minutes, I felt able to look around. I sat up, slowly, carefully, and looked for the source of the voice. To my great surprise, I was not in the revival room… or at least, not one that I recognized. The room was small, clean, and colored in gentle pastels. I was further shocked to discover that the voice was that of a friendly-looking robot, humanoid in shape, holding some sort of electronic tablet.

“Hello!” they said, and smiled. Their smile, amazingly, was somehow reassuring. “I am Mnemosyne, your post-stasis bedside attendant.”

“H-hello…?” I managed. “What… what is… where am I?”

“Ah, let me get you up to speed. Welcome to the fifty-third century of what you most likely know as the Common Era.”

I blinked, failing to grasp the meaning of the sentence. “The what?”

Mnemosyne continued. “Oh yes, it has been some time indeed, but please save all your questions for the end of this orientation. According to your chart, you have missed…” They glanced at the information on the pad. “...approximately three thousand and twenty-four years of intervening time.” They paused, and a look of concern crossed their artificial face.

“Oh dear. You should probably lie back down for this.”

The fun thing is, if we keep calling it Wolftopia the IAU will inevitably have to bow to public pressure and grant it official nomenclature status.

The ground rumbles as a catchy piano tune echoes in the distance. The far-off echo of Mariah Carey's voice is heard, barely audible at first, but rapidly it grows louder. You know the words before you hear them. The memories of your old retail job flood back. You cover your ears, your eyes welling up with tears because you know what's coming. The ground splits beneath your feet. You hear sleigh bells that rival your terrified screams in their overwhelming volume, and you plummet into a frozen, sickly-sweet Hell.

trains are to engineering as crabs are to biology. on a long enough timescale, if you optimize almost any system enough, you eventually get some form of either a train or a crab

You just posted like ten different things about potatoes in the span of maybe five minutes, and I gotta know your take on "The Martian".

Like, the (fictional) man alone on a planet literally only survives because of potatoes shrink-wrapped in plastic for a Thanksgiving meal. If they weren't slated to be on Mars for Thanksgiving, he would have died.

And Andy Weir (author of the original novel) did such a good job with the science of every other element to the story, I honest-to-god believe that potatoes could actually manage to grow in Martian soil (even if that's not been proven for certain afaik).

Which means..... could potatoes terraform Mars into sustaining life??? Are potatoes the key to the universe???

Haha sorry for going so hard on them! Those were mostly all posts from 2020 when gardening and fantasy worldbuilding were lockdown fixations for me. One of them blew up recently so I wanted to give The People more of the content it seemed they were looking for. I don't actually know a lot about potatoes. I just think they're neat.

I do not want to take apart the concept of "colonizing Mars" as some kind of woke gotcha. I want to take your question seriously and charitably. However, I just am the kind of person who's like "Hmm, 'colonize', we should really stop and unpack that word," so let's do that, without forgetting the potato element.

(What "I don't know a lot" means: Potatoes were a crop my family grew several acres of for a few years on our farm before we switched our focus to sheep. I am about 50% as reliable as a horticultural brochure on various potato diseases and growing condition issues. I have listened to two University lectures and read perhaps four historical journal articles beginning-to-end on how the Columbian Exchange affected early-modern Europe, that and half as much again on medieval and early modern European farming practices and population changes, and perhaps three science/history articles specifically on the domestication and proliferation of the potato. I am a white Canadian who actively seeks out information and training in Indigenous history and culture in the Americas, but that's probably still only equal to like, two Native Studies classes in university. I know more than the average person on this topic, but I am also not an expert compared to people who have devoted serious time to learning about this.)

But I have some intuitions in a couple of ways:

The Martian is probably being wildly over-optimistic about its potatoes. They would probably have been irradiated into sterility before being vacuum-packed, and I don't think you can split and propagate them that quickly or successfully. However, potatoes can definitely grow in all kinds of conditions (including under my sink).

They might not be the world's healthiest or happiest potatoes, tho. Soil quality definitely affects the end product. Presumably Watney, being a botanist studying Mars' soil composition, knew how much he had to ameliorate his soil with latrine compost (which would definitely have needed a LOT of processing, since human waste is generally not good for plants, but maybe he used chemicals to speed that up?) to get good soil. However, we would probably need to add a LOT of shit to Mars' soil (and air, and water) for it to host plant life.

Mark Watney makes a joke about having "colonized Mars" because "colony" is Latin for "farm" and he farmed on Mars so haha, funny joke! And we talk about colonies on Mars partly because that's what science fiction did, and a lot of science fiction has been into that colonialism aesthetic. But colonialism and empires actually aren't great, not just because they necessitate huge amounts of racism, oppression, and genocide—I know, you asked me a fun question about potatoes and did not sign up for this, I'm not here to drag you, hear me out—but because they're also really sucky models for agriculture and successful societies generally.

My British ancestors tried to be colonial farmers in a place that is sometimes colder than Mars (Canada's Treaty Six), and let me tell you: IT SUCKED. Most of the crops and herbs and vegetables and flowers that settlers here brought from home and are used to? DON'T FUCKEM GROW. For the Canadian prairies to become conventional farmland, farmers and scientists had to scramble to find, or produce, cold-hardy varieties of everything from wheat to roses. A lot of flowers and plants that are unkillable invasive zombie perennials in other climates don't survive our winters no matter hard we try. The trees and flowers that hold cultural or sentimental attachments for us often don't grow here. The climate is so harsh and population is spread so thin that we cannot do the 100 mile diet and eat foods we're familiar with, and can hardly even manage the 1000 mile diet. (Not that I try, but, my family did once look into it)

A huge number of colonial homesteads, where the pioneers go out on their little covered wagon and build little houses on the prairie? Failed miserably and got bought up by land speculators. My own family came out to Alberta in the 1880s and moved around from land assignment to land assignment, like, six times before settling at their current place in the early 1900s.

Meanwhile: POTATOES

Potatoes are less than ten thousand years old! I am not any kind of expert on archaeology, please nobody throw things, but humans showed up in the Andes (think: high, cold mountains) of South America roughly 9,000 years ago. There are hundreds of wild potato varieties, but they generally produce fairly tiny tubers. It took active work of Indigenous Andean people around 8,000 years ago around Lake Titicaca to cultivate specific strains of potato, doing oldschool genetic modification to make them bigger, more delicious, and hardier. From that cultivation effort around a single species of wild potatoes, they produced thousands of cultivated potato varieties.

Ancient Andean farmers and botanists also played a big part in cultivating quinoa from wild amaranth, as well as producing modern food crops you probably haven't heard of, like oca, olluco, mashua, and yacon, and also coca, which may get a bad rap because it's what cocaine and coca-cola are made from but you cannot deny it's got kick.

Basically, Indigenous people of the Americas (South, Central, and North) went all in on botany and plant cultivation. Plants that we take for granted now have mostly been developed by Indigenous people in the past few thousand years: Tobacco, sunflowers, marigolds, tomatoes, pumpkins, rubber, vanilla, cocoa, sweetcorn, maize, and most kinds of pepper except peppercorn. These things were not found; they were made, by careful cultivation of the world as it was.

This gives us a vision of the future. Colonization, and industrial agriculture, both lean us towards the vision of a totally uniform end product, with the same potato varieties grown on each farm because we have made every farm the same. Instead we could embrace biodiversity and focus on privileging local knowledge and considering the interactions of environment, plants, microbiota, and people. We could create potatoes that were happy on Mars. We could create Mars that is happy to have us. We could create a society that can accept what Mars has to offer.

A lot of why we dream about colonizing Mars is the idea that the Earth itself is dying, that we are killing it, and we need to abandon this farmstead and seek out a new frontier. I acknowledge that shit is bad, but I don't agree with that framing. I am increasingly persuaded that there is a third path between ecological destruction and mass exodus, and I think we need to reject European colonial mentality that creates the forced choice. I find far more use in privileging the knowledge of people who live on and with land than their landlords and rulers, and I especially find value in Indigenous knowledge of land management practices and food production.

I am absolutely not saying that Indigenous people were or are wonderful magical ~spiritual beings~ who frolicked in an Edenic paradise that only knew death and disease once white people showed up. This isn't noble savage bullshit, nor am I invoking people who existed once but whom I have never met. I am saying that I have Indigenous neighbours, colleagues, relatives, and elected representatives. I have learned about mental health, leatherworking, botany, and ecology from Metis and First Nations elders and knowledge-keepers. And like. They have good and useful shit to say.

This is about culture, not race. It is not that their biological DNA means that they know more than me about how to get food from this landscape. It's about cultural history and what we learn from our heritages. What have our cultures privileged? Like, Europe has historically been super into things like metallurgy, domesticating livestock, and creating dairy products. If I want to smelt iron or choose animals to make cheese from, European society would have a lot of useful information for me! And what Indigenous cultures in the Americas have historically focused on instead of cows and copper* include 1) getting REAL familiar with your local flora and figuring out how to make sure you have lots of the herbs and grains and roots and berries you need, and 2) how to make a human society where people can live and have good lives, but do not damage the environment enough to impair the ability of future generations to have the same sort of life.

*Edit to add: Actually many Indigenous American societies DID practice metalsmithing of various types, including copper. Which I forgot, sorry!

Conclusion

I think we could use the processes that formed the potato to find and foster forms of life that could survive on Mars. It would involve learning to think that botany is a sexy science, and understanding just how rich and complicated the environment is. To oxygenate the atmosphere, we'd have to get super enthusiastic about algae and lichen and wetlands. We would have to learn to care deeply about the microorganisms living in the soil, and whether the potatoes are happy.

We'd have to create an economy that counts oxygen and carbon dioxide production on its balance sheets. To learn how to wait for forests to grow back after a fire, instead of giving up in despair because the seedlings aren't trees yet. To do the work now and be hopeful even though we might not see the payoffs for decades, or our victories might only be witnessed by future generations.

So yes, I think we could totally plant potatoes on Mars

But I also think that if we ever got there, we'd have turned into the kind of people who could also save Earth in the first place.

Which makes it a good enough goal in my opinion.